Current scheduling systems function primarily as calendars to simply record dates and times in which appointments are scheduled. These scheduling systems of the prior art allow a service provider to track jobs that have been scheduled, but do not assist the service provider in balancing the intake and outflow of new jobs to improve workflow through a facility. Furthermore, these prior art scheduling systems do not assist the service provider in calculating the first available date in which an appointment can be scheduled for completion of a specific job. Instead, the service provider must manually browse through a calendar to see when appointments have already been scheduled and make a judgement call as to whether the job can be scheduled between other jobs that have already been scheduled. This can be extremely time consuming, inefficient and ineffective.
The current practice for service providers, such as vehicle collision repair service providers, is to schedule work only for drop-off. Collision repair service providers generally have vehicles dropped off for repair at the beginning of a production week and attempt to make delivery (i.e. completion of the repair job) of as many vehicles as possible by the end of the production week. This practice is extremely inefficient, and results in reducing the potential workflow through the facility.